You do know who pays for Firefox development, right?

http://postgis.refractions.net/ - pretty good spatial functions based on top of PostgreSQL, and not tied to Oracle.

There are many, many open source GIS packages that you might find useful rather than implementing everything yourself. http://maptools.org/ is one place to get some pointers from.

Any article that starts off with the problems of a web page not loading, then goes on to explain that it's because ISPs are throttling a different, completely unrelated protocol is either very confused or intentionally deceptive. It's the NYT, so "confused" is a fair bet.

I have around 30 virtual machines running on a single tower server running ESXi. Solaris/x86, Windows XP, 7, server. A dozen different Linux installations. (Mostly used for software development, with a Jenkins-based continuous integration system building code across different platforms, spinning VMs up as needed).

Pretty much anything I could do with a rack of servers, I can do remotely with a bunch of VMs. I can access the console remotely, reboot, power-on, power-off virtual machines remotely. I can create a new VM and install an OS on it remotely. Add network switches, replumb the network between them. Mount or eject ISO images.

And there's stuff you can't do easily with physical servers that you can with VMs. Take a system snapshot, change something or test something, then roll back to the snapshot.

For "production" use there are a lot of tradeoffs between hardware and virtualization, but to play with or develop on it's hard to beat.

I have 8 cores, 16 gigs of RAM and a bit under 3 terabytes of disk. It cost a lot less, burns less power and makes *much* less noise than the rack of servers it replaced. You could get by with a lot less than that if you limited the number of VMs you had running concurrently.

All that was stolen was names and email addresses. It's not like spammers and other online criminals don't have those anyway.

http://blog.wordtothewise.com/2011/04/epsilon-keep-calm-and-carry-on/

Because in this context "free" sometimes means "freely available to use", sometimes it means "sorta freely available to use, but you need to mention us in your docs" and sometimes it means "impossible to use, due to proprietary license that may (or may not) allow you to link to this code at all".

Some of the more bizarrely licensed "free" code isn't even compatible with other "free" code, and they can't both be used in the same application. Or maybe they can, but you're not allowed to distribute the application. (See readline-vs-openssl for one annoying example of that).

In the world of software licensing "MIT" or "Apache" or "Artistic" means "free", "BSD" usually means "free", but "Free" almost never means "free".

It's great for (some sorts of) casual gaming. It's a decent media player.

It's superb for traveling and conferences - it's got a good web browser and mail client. And adequate IM/IRC (which'll get a lot better come November). It makes a decent ebook reader (not quite as good as a dedicated e-ink device, but better than anything else). And it has VPN and an ssh client, so I can even tunnel in to my production servers if I have an "Oh-shit" moment - usable with the on-screen keyboard, more so with the little bluetooth one I can leave in the hotel room unless I need it. And it'll do that over wifi, or in an emergency I can pay $15 and get cellular data without needing a contract. Runs all day on a single charge. And it has all my music on it too, and streaming netflix, so I'm not stuck watching crappy hotel TV late at night.

So it's not a replacement for a laptop, or even a netbook. But it's great for being the only thing I need to carry at a conference or on a plane - and it's half the weight of even an ultralight laptop/netbook, let alone the seven pound monstrosity that is my main laptop.

And having one around - it's very nice for other things too. Checking imdb while watching TV, having docs open while I'm working without having to use up laptop screen space for them.

makes the UK 40% tax for income over £40k look enormous!

That's 9% state income tax _on top of_ 35% federal income tax. And there are a bunch of other taxes too. It would still be less than California income tax, which tops out at over 10% state income tax (along with sales tax of up to about 9.5%).

Around half of US residents don't actually pay any income tax (family of 4 earning $50k (£32k-ish) - or thereabouts is the threshold before you pay anything), so there's a fairly heavy income tax burden on those who pay them in order to carry the rest.

I've heard good things about UmeVoice - http://www.theboom.com/v/products/index.html